$25 million for youth-led climate groups: Giving Pledge signer Xin Liu bets on the next generation, building on $300 million in giving to date
Xin Liu has a simple way of explaining why she gives. She says she’s in the business of hope.
Recently that hope took a concrete form.
Twenty-five organizations run by people as young as 15, working in 33 countries, learned they would each receive $1 million in flexible, multiyear funding.
They can spend it on whatever their work needs most.
The money comes from the Emerging Climate Champions Award, a $25 million global open call.
Liu’s Enlight Foundation designed it with The Patchwork Collective, and Lever for Change ran it.
Lever for Change is the nonprofit affiliate of the MacArthur Foundation that has become one of the main channels for large open competitions in philanthropy.
Enlight committed $20 million.
The Patchwork Collective, the family philanthropy of Snowflake co-founder Benoit Dageville and his wife, Marie, heard about the competition and offered another $5 million on its own initiative.
That gift funded five more awards.
Liu spent years as a storyteller before she became a funder.
She was an award-winning writer and photojournalist in China and the United States.
Her work appeared in China Youth Daily, the Baltimore Sun, the Miami Herald, and Time and Fortune, and she later published two books in China.
That background helps explain how she approaches giving.
A reporter learns early that the people closest to a problem usually understand it best and that the most important voices are often the ones nobody has asked.
She founded Enlight in 2004 and has led it ever since.
The foundation began with a commitment to equal educational opportunity for young people.
Over two decades, it has made more than 400 grants totaling over $300 million.
At some point the foundation’s two great concerns, young people and the planet, merged into one.
“Two of the biggest challenges facing young people today are mental wellbeing and climate change,” Liu wrote when she joined the Giving Pledge in 2025.
She then made a decision few foundation leaders make. She would devote all her time to Enlight and direct its resources to those two causes, bringing in as many partners as she could.
The foundation reported $254 million in assets in its most recent public filing, and she has set a roughly eight-year horizon.
“I see investing in young leaders and the future of young people,” she wrote, “as one of the most optimistic things I can do.”
The climate award grew from a gap Liu kept noticing.
Climate change has risen overall.
Yet the young people working on the front lines of the crisis, the ones who will live longest with its consequences, received only a sliver of it.
She named the reason plainly.
“There’s a little funder stigma of trusting youth,” she said when the award was announced, “trusting their capacity, their ability to lead.”
In her experience, the opposite was true. Young leaders were often the most inventive people in the field because they were so close to the problem.
“As an older generation,” she said, “we have a responsibility in helping them, empowering them, to scale their work, too.”
So she built a competition that trusts them.
To qualify, an organization had to meet at least two of three youth-leadership tests: leaders between 15 and 35 in executive roles, on the board, or both.
It also had to show at least two years of work and measurable results.
More than a dozen young advisers helped shape the rules before the call opened.
Fellow applicants scored one another’s proposals in a peer review before an international panel of experts weighed in.
The gifts are paid out over one to five years, depending on what each organization can take on.
Liu also promised more than money: mentorship, introductions and, in her words, the chance “to really watch them flourish.”
The response was enormous.
Applications came from youth-led groups in 108 countries.
The 25 winners work in conservation and biodiversity, sustainable agriculture, renewable energy, movement building and climate policy.
Several are led by Indigenous peoples and women, groups that traditional funding has often passed over.
In Montreal, the news reached Lab22, a nonprofit that works inside Quebec’s secondary schools and helps students and teachers turn their buildings into working labs for environmental change.
Its executive director, Elysa Vaillancourt, says the award will let Lab22 reach more than 80,000 students and staff, support more than 80 school communities, and spark more than 400 projects.
These range from urban gardens and greener school grounds to sustainable transportation and better food systems.
“This recognition belongs to an entire community,” she said, “but above all the young people and educational communities we accompany every day.”
Flavie Léveillé, a 10th-grader at Jacques-Rousseau Secondary School, put it more personally.
The program, she said, “has not only contributed immensely to transforming my school environmentally, but it has also helped me grow as a person.”
In Ghana, Agrointroductions Ghana has worked since 2014 on ecosystem restoration, nature-based solutions and conservation finance.
Its focus is helping local women and young people take part in protecting the land and earn a living from it.
Its chief executive, Abdullah Hamza, sees the award as confirmation of a belief the group has always held.
“Lasting climate action is sustained by the people with daily lived experiences of its impacts,” he said. When local organizations are supported, he added, “They can drive meaningful community-led climate action and build a more resilient future for generations to come.”
Liu reacted to the full list as usual, giving credit to the people doing the work.
“Real, lasting climate solutions happen when we don’t just give young people a seat at the table but hand them the mic as leaders and innovators,” she said.
“These awardees are showing us what is possible.”
The partnership with the Dagevilles came naturally.
Marie Dageville started The Patchwork Collective with very little infrastructure and learned by doing.
She and her husband have said its purpose is “to help redistribute wealth in the world,” and its grants are mostly unrestricted and multiyear, the same trust-based approach the climate award uses.
Cedric Dageville, a principal at the Collective, said the winners “remind us that some of the most promising solutions are already taking shape in local communities.”
The climate award is one of two major commitments in Enlight’s spend-down.
The other is a $100 million, five-year commitment to the ICONIQ Impact Youth Mental Wellbeing Co-Lab, which directs funding to organizations addressing anxiety and depression in young people worldwide.
Both efforts helped earn Liu a place on this year’s TIME100 Philanthropy list.
She also chairs the Xinhe Foundation in China, which funds early-childhood research, rural reading programs and youth leadership.
She serves as an adviser to The Natural Capital Project, a Stanford-based initiative that helps governments and communities measure the value of nature.
She has also signed up as a future astronaut with Virgin Galactic.
The award is designed to keep growing after Wednesday.
All 25 winners, along with other top-ranked applicants, have joined Lever for Change’s Bold Solutions Network, a vetted pool that other donors can fund directly.
When the call opened, Liu made a straightforward offer to her peers: each additional $1 million would fund one more organization.
She rarely talks about the size of her own giving.
She talks about who will be in charge next.
She describes young people as stewards of the planet and its people, and she has said more than once that she believes we are in good hands.
With $25 million now in the hands of 25 organizations, she is giving them the resources to prove it.